549: Why I Trade 25 Strategies After 17 Years of Trading (Dave Mabe)

About this episode

Dave Mabe discusses his journey of developing 25 automated trading strategies after nearly quitting during a significant drawdown.

Why I Trade 25 Strategies After 17 Years of Trading In episode 549 of the Desire To Trade Podcast, you will be listening to an interview with Dave Mabe, who's been trading for more than 20 years, sharing how nearly quitting during a massive drawdown pushed him to rethink everything about how he trades. What started as one working idea turned into 25 fully automated strategies running every day. He also dives into the hardest lesson of his career—trading through a brutal drawdown—and how it forced him to build a system for creating new strategies. The video is also available for you to watch on YouTube. >> Watch the video recording! Topics Covered In This Episode 00:00 Introduction 00:37 Who is Dave Mabe? 01:06 Fully automated trading vs manual execution 01:40 How Dave started trading 04:04 The problem with learning from intuition-based traders 05:50 Can you really make money with discretionary trading? 06:45 First automated strategy: success or failure? 09:28 Do algo traders struggle with emotions too? 11:09 Is coding required for automated trading in 2026? 12:13 Why backtests look great but live trading fails 15:48 How much variance between backtest and live is acceptable? 16:45…

People in this episode

Host: Etienne Crete

Guest: Dave Mabe

Topics covered

• trading strategies
• automated trading
• drawdown
• trading psychology
• algorithmic trading

Keywords

• trading
• strategies
• automated trading
• drawdown
• algorithmic trading
• trading psychology
• backtesting

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